Collector - January 2018 - 40
BUSINESSOPERATIONS Missed Connections How call blocking and labeling tools are negatively affecting the debt collection industry-and what you can do. By Anne Rosso May T he Federal Communications Commission's regulation of "robocalls" continues to be one of the most closely watched issues in the credit and collection industry today. After receiving the green light from the FCC, carriers and other providers began offering consumers various robocall blocking tools, which are having devastating affects on legitimate business' right-party contact rates. At ACA International's Fall Forum & Expo, Michele Shuster, partner at Mac Murray & Shuster LLP and general counsel for the Professional Association of Customer Engagement (PACE), along with Karl Koster, chief IP and regulatory counsel for Noble Systems Corporation, presented their expert analysis on the improper blocking and labeling of legitimate calls. They explored the development of this issue, how it's affecting legitimate businesses and what's being considered to fix the problem. 40 WHAT'S HAPPENING To thwart or identify fraudulent robocalls, consumers can use two types of tools. Call blocking tools prevent the call from being completed. Call labeling tools apply a tag for consumers to read on their caller ID or smartphone when the call is connected-for example: "telemarketer" or "suspected scam"-and consumers can decide if they will accept the call, send it to voicemail, block it or even potentially mark as a scam. The FCC's Telephone Consumer Protection Act Ruling and Order, released in July 2015, allowed the use of consumerinitiated call blocking tools. These can be third-party devices or apps consumers purchase themselves or network-level services they request from their carrier or are built into their phone. Shuster said PACE members, many of which are contact centers, started seeing significant declines in their contact rates starting in March and April 2017, on average by 30 percent. If your calls are being blocked, you probably won't immediately know what's happening. Is the line busy, did the call drop or was it blocked? "They need to return an error code that says that the call has been blocked," Koster said. "You need to know right way if you need to talk to the carrier to mitigate this. At the moment, we don't have a mechanism to do this, and without that mechanism, we're left in the lurch." The FCC has not addressed call labeling, but it is currently just as pressing of an issue that has started happening through certain carriers whether or not the consumer has directly requested the service. Koster noted that the crowd-sourced approach to third-party call labeling is particularly threatening to legitimate businesses. "From the experience we've had with this, it can happen when as few as 12 ACAINTERNATIONAL.ORG